European Cystic Fibrosis Society 2024
ECFS 2024 was close to home for the Irish and UK teams. The team headed to Glasgow for the conference. Sharon Sutton the study pharmacist looked at whether adherence barriers changed on ETI. The data showed there were no changes in the number of barriers for the 12+ cohort after 1 and 2 years. The data also showed there was no link between the number of adherence barriers and medication adherence.
Sharon also looked at the different ways adherence is measured on the study. It is measured in three ways. 1. Self-reported by the participant using questionnaires, 2. Medication pick up rates from pharmacy records and 3. Electronic reporting with the MEMs caps. The data showed that self-reports overestimate adherence compared to pharmacy records. A more reliable adherence device needs to be developed to accurately measure adherence.
Paul presented the 24month data on the 6-11 cohort. The results were the same as those shared by Paul in Vienna at ECFS 2023. The data showed maintained improvements in lung clearance index, sweat chloride and FEV1 up to 24months after treatment of ETI. No significant improvements were shown in BMI or the Cystic Fibrosis Revised Questionnaire (CFQR) but again, this is likely due to a ceiling effect as the participants had normal BMI and CFQR scores prior to starting ETI.
Sam Nolan who is based in Queen’s University Belfast presented data on proteomic and inflammation analysis of sputum and nasal lavage samples. He showed that ETI treatment is associated with significant decreases in IL-8 and neutrophil elastase, which are markers of lung inflammation. He also showed that ETI has an effect on protein involves in immune response and hopes to look into this further and present at future conferences.
